


Persephone

by Quecksilver_Eyes



Series: i look at you and there's no speech left in me [6]
Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Carrie Wilson & Julie Molina - Freeform, Flynn & Julie Molina - Freeform, Gen, julies love affair with music, on grief, on mothers and daughters, on mourning mothers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:47:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27190618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quecksilver_Eyes/pseuds/Quecksilver_Eyes
Summary: It’s an age old story, this thing that’s stuck in her bones: Hades sees Persephone and the bloom of her hair, Hades sees beauty and wonder and life – bare feet and a tumbling world, and he takes her with him, without a care, without permission. Demeter rots the entire world in her grief, raises snow and ice and ashes from the ground as Persephone sits, pomegranate-heavy, amongst all that has long since died. In this story, Persephone loves Hades the way Julie loves music: like something tender, strung up in her heart and fitted between her ribs and her diaphragm, something untouchable sitting somewhere at the back of her throat. In this story, Persephone loses her mother to the dead. In this story, there is no half-year cycle in which Julie may touch her mother again, no spring nor summer to lie in her lap, with her hands in Julie’s hair and her music, alive still. In this story, Persephone stays with the dead and their soft hands.
Relationships: Alex & Julie Molina & Luke Patterson & Reggie, Julie Molina & Julie Molina's Mother, Julie Molina's Mother/Ray Molina, one sided Julie Molina/Luke Patterson
Series: i look at you and there's no speech left in me [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2015690
Comments: 4
Kudos: 35





	Persephone

Sometimes, in the mornings, when the boys are still asleep and curled up behind that door, padlocked and sealed shut, Julie sits on the floor of her room, with her mother’s life scattered across the wood and her sheets, and presses dahlias and records and clothes to her chest until she can barely feel her own breath in her lungs or sitting at the back of her throat. The sun sits heavy on her skin, like something slow and viscous dripping from her fingertips, like bubblegum stuck to her lips, and there’s something heavy at the bottom of her stomach; hollow as it is. Her phone lies somewhere at her feet, with Flynn flooding from it, reaching for her.

It’s an age old story, this thing that’s stuck in her bones: Hades sees Persephone and the bloom of her hair, Hades sees beauty and wonder and life – bare feet and a tumbling world, and he takes her with him, without a care, without permission. Demeter rots the entire world in her grief, raises snow and ice and ashes from the ground as Persephone sits, pomegranate-heavy, amongst all that has long since died. In this story, Persephone loves Hades the way Julie loves music: like something tender, strung up in her heart and fitted between her ribs and her diaphragm, something untouchable sitting somewhere at the back of her throat. In this story, Persephone loses her mother to the dead. In this story, there is no half-year cycle in which Julie may touch her mother again, no spring nor summer to lie in her lap, with her hands in Julie’s hair and her music, alive still. In this story, Persephone stays with the dead and their soft hands.

In this story Orpheus turned around, desperate and wild-eyed and doomed.

Her mother’s trunk doesn’t smell like her, anymore, it just smells like moth balls and old paper, and Carlos smiles with their mother’s dimples and their mother’s eyes. There’s something stuck underneath Julie’s fingernails or maybe in Luke’s eyes or the shape of his mouth, something like Alex’ soft hands and Reggie’s bass in a soft thrum just underneath her heartbeat, something like:

Fawns stay hidden in the tall grass their mothers leave them in even after the doe has died – maybe it was a wolf or an accident or something frothing dripping from the pit of her, maybe it was something in her bones. Maybe it was just a hunter, with big hands and bigger eyes, and his mouth fitted around the world and all he can reap from it. The grass is high above Julie’s head and dense against her bones, and she stays there; unmoved and unchanged and trembling. The grass is too high now, see, and it has to be cut under the hot summer sun. And the fawn doesn’t move.

Julie lay buried in this meadow until she couldn’t bare looking at the piano in the garage anymore, suspended underneath the morning sun, as if she might come home with her hair dishevelled and her voice pressed onto vinyl, and butterflies on the straps of her dress. As if, maybe, if Julie could live through the winter, she might see her mother again; for a half-year, with the sweetness of a pomegranate on Julie’s lips and wedged into her mother’s grief.

Instead, the dead are in her mother’s place, with music that was stolen from their mouths and underneath their hands, and they write songs that get stuck in Julie’s teeth; breathless. Instead, she’s on a stage with Luke and his mouth, with Reggie and Alex and the echo of her mother in their voices; a tender thing, carefully wrapped around her waist and kissed onto her forehead. They’re smiling, still, and Julie leans into them and her microphone and the world; changed as it is.

This is the story, in between the pleats of Julie’s trousers:

Her mother dies and her father doesn’t stop grasping for her. Her mother dies and Carrie chokes until she can barely talk at all. Her mother dies and Flynn stays, warm against Julie’s skin. Persephone loses Demeter to the dead, and not even music can bring them back.


End file.
